Friday, February 17, 2012

Canucks Fans Worst In The NHL

by NiNY

It's not even the relatively few morons. It's the rest of them, sitting there in their ivory towers telling anyone who dares to suggest that they, as a group, are an embarrassment to civilization that it's unfair.

You know what? Silence condones.

Don't try to get all high and mighty when your city literally burns because your team couldn't close the deal against the Bruins. YOUR CITY IS ON FIRE! Take responsibility for your city. It's not about cleaning it up afterward. It's about sending a clear message that that kind of behavior is not acceptable. It's about outing the guy you hear in the bar afterward bragging about turning over a cop car or something.

Don't pretend yours is a higher station than the absolutely reprehensible asshole who defiled Lucic's church in Burnaby. YOU let your society accept this kind of behavior, so now it gets to define your society.

Like when Gunnery Sgt. Hartman finds the jelly donut in Private Pyle's footlocker, and decrees that, from then on out, he will not punish Pyle when Pyle fucks up, he will punish the rest of them instead because the rest of them did not properly motivate Private Pyle. It's time for the high brow Vancouverites (Vancouverians?) to wrap their soap bars in their towels and beat the shit out of the Private Pyles among them. Figuratively, literally, either way.

Unless....unless of course the high brow Vancouverites really secretly, deep down inside sort of a little bit WANT the hooligans to continue to hooliganize. Because maybe they're just as full of repressed frustration because their team has gone 40 years without a Cup, and habitually breaks their heart every year, as the few among them for whom the only difference is that they don't have that one synapse in their brain that inhibits idiotic behavior. Maybe the high brows are just cowards, compared to the hooligans? No. Can't be that, right? That's not how civil society works. Lord of the Flies was fictional, right? The natural order of humans is order, right? Right.

This is very simple: why is it okay to continue to tacitly allow this kind of behavior? What if Milan Lucic - not a Bruins fan, Lucic himself - tagged some Vancouver church with anti-Canucks messaging? What would Canucks fans do? They'd go ape shit is what they'd do.

But if a Canucks player had been the one who tagged Lucic's church, what would the faithful do? I'm not sure I can answer that question - and I think that, if they really asked themselves to respond truthfully, Canucks fans can't answer it either. "Would we say 'Enough is enough'? Would we march down to the church and scrub it clean ourselves? Would we demand that player be released from the team?" You don't know, do you?

And, because you (Canucks fans) don't know how you'd react, that tells you just how far around the bend you are as a fanbase.

Canucks fans manage to get themselves appointed as theoretically impartial bloggers for league-wide sites and go out of their way to trash teams like the Wild when the Wild was winning (and the Canucks weren't). Now that the Canucks have regained their God-given place above the Wild in the standings, those same bloggers are silent about the Wild. And, at the same time continue to go on about how there's no rivalry between the Wild and the Canucks. How pathetic is that? You need to beat up another team just to feel better about the fact that your team was struggling? That's disgusting. I'm a Wild fan, I'm not trying to obfuscate that. And, as such, I view the Canucks as a rival. At least I admit it.

Canucks fans are an embarrassment to sports. They're a black eye on the NHL. They're a blight on society. This isn't a one-off of ill-behavior. It's a pattern, doubtless committed by a minority of Canucks fans. But it's also a pattern of acceptance and tacit approval by the majority of Canucks fans. One is not more right - or wrong - than the other.

4 comments:

You say "it's not about cleaning up" - then excoriate the majority of Canucks fans for tacitly "approving" of actions like the recent incident at Lucic's church and the riot. It's strange because I'd suggest to you that the mass clean up by regular Vancouverites that occurred post-riot was about the majority showing their tacit *disapproval* of the actions of a minority of the Canucks fan-base. Basically in total contradiction to your final point.

I don't deny that there's a pattern of troubling behavior by a minority of Canucks fans in terms of aggressiveness, vandalism and sadly even violence - especially over the past 8 months or so. But the idea that there's a silent acceptance/approval of these sorts of activities by the majority of Canucks fans is misinformed, and totally bogus. Most of us, like most normal people, are embarrassed by this crap.

Artem: were there any stories about the Canucks fan who heard a guy bragging in the bar about the car he overturned, and called the police to rat the guy out?

My point is, if all you do is clean up their mess for them, then you're reinforcing the behavior.

I'm not saying you shouldn't have cleaned up. But, if that's all you do, and you don't do anything that demands accountability or that those responsible be found and brought to justice - and then go find them and bring them to justice - you're sending a message to those few that they're cool with you.

That may not be your intent, but that's evidently how they're taking it.

You, as a society, need to make it not okay for those few idiots to do what they do that gives you ALL a black eye.

POI

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Nick in New York (NiNY) is just a guy with a computer and a love of hockey. And a wife and two daughters whom he adores. And a decreasing ability to metabolize beer in a way that doesn't, er, add to the bottom line, as it were.

Feel free to toss him an email with any thoughts on the blog, or the sport.

Mason...you don't really want to mess with Mason. He's nasty with the writing skillz. And can drop some ridic culture pulls into his narrative. Lover of haiku.

Mason can be reached at: jaredmas@gmail.com

Did you know that no two zebras' stripes are the same? Well we have a zebra here at HTP, and his name is Doubles. Only he's a hockey zebra - and he's here going to share his great wealth of hockey knowledge from an on-ice official's standpoint with you. Feel free to read him in Chris Rock's voice.